Whatever happened to Jeanine Burnside?

Once, when I was young, I lived in Puebla, Mexico, on a farm outside the city. A visiting family came to church one Sunday morning, and Jeanine was in my class--a little girl, outspoken and laughing and so very American. Whether they lived in our city for a summer, two weeks, or a couple of days--that I don't remember. I just remember that right away, we hit it off. She was freckled, and funny, and full of ambition, and we played together for hours. That was the summer my little sisters and I had turned our camp trailer into an orphanage for lost dolls--all the cabinets were bunk beds with blankets hanging down and an occasional plastic foot. So when Jeanine came over we all played refugee camp. Outside we traveled--by foot and by bike-- on perilous foothills along the wide "river" and under the pines taking the longest detour around the edges of the farm to bring the wretched, abandoned doll babies to the safety of our home. There we fed them and swaddled them and put them to bed where they lay contentedly while we "adults" discussed world shaking events and gave them an occasional pat. Jeanine had just read a new book and was raving all about it. I still see her great green eyes and the dramatic way she moved her little hands in wonder. Such stories! Such lands! Such dangers far removed from our world!

Later, of course, I sought the book in the English speaker's library--a tiny room tucked behind a metal gate midst the three and four story buildings downtown. And the miracle was that I found it, for there weren't too many books on those shelves, particularly not children's books, not by the incomparable CS. Lewis.

I've often wondered what happened to Jeanine. She grew up, I suppose, and only faintly remembered that pine-fenced farm on the outskirts of a foreign city where little girls saved starving doll children from the evils of the world, while listening to tales of Aslan and Dragons on the Lone Islands far from Narnia.

Written for Sunday Scribblings